


Bargain

by GuyOfShy



Series: Locked Tomb fics [1]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Bickering, F/F, Fluff and Smut, Hate Sex, Really Light Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:00:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25920958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GuyOfShy/pseuds/GuyOfShy
Summary: Between their excursions into Canaan House, Gideon once again finds herself at Harrowhark's mercy with her back to the floor, though she supposed lying on a bed was better than being beat half to death on the drillshaft dirt. Nevertheless, they’d struck this deal together, but that didn’t mean they had to be happy about it.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: Locked Tomb fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1937449
Kudos: 44





	Bargain

To be blindsided by Harrowhark Nonagesimus was to be expected. Gideon should have anticipated her modus operandi; that she didn't, she attributed to her hormones blindsiding her first, but she also had assumed that Harrowhark was suffering from a similarly hasty lust. But, as usual, the Reverend Daughter hid behind her pale veils, playing coldly coy for her cavalier. Gideon clicked her teeth: Harrow merely gestured a hand in response, beckoning another skeletal hand to bind her down harder to her bed. Gideon mistook her flushed cheeks for the beginning of a mild blood sweat. Maybe it was less of a blindsiding and more of the usual tantrum that Harrow liked to passive-aggressively throw when Gideon defied her intentions.

"You really can't resist me, can you?" She said with heartless complacency, as if to reinforce that notion. "I lie to your face, I scheme behind your back, give you the constantly cold shoulder, and still you fall right into me the moment I open my arms."

"It is kinda my job in case you're forgetting, my twilit heiress, so you don't have to be such a dickwad about it. I’m only doing what you asked.”

“I never asked you to manhandle me like that.”

“I barely touched you, princess. Though I'd say I'm resisting my urge to get up right now and clobber you pretty well."

"Talk is cheap," Harrow sighed, "as usual." Gideon expected another hand or two to bolt her down further as insurance, but Harrow accomplished that with a look of ice-cold contempt. "Don't think for a second that I would dare be bottom to you, and your filthy magazines," she added as a thorny afterthought, the prudishness of which did not offend Gideon in the slightest.

"Oh, my apologies, Reverend Daughter, for wanting to get this over with so we can never speak of it again."

"I'm beginning to grow tired of that mouth of yours," Harrow murmured, her teasing tone betraying the fierce stare she silenced Gideon with. This was Harrow's desperate attempt at maintaining the normalcy between them, to keep her proposition as close to the standard brand of venomous as possible, even as her lips pressed Gideon's down.

Gideon reluctantly kissed back, thinking of all the people she'd rather lock lips with before Harrowhark Nonagesimus; off the top of her head Corona and Dulcinea topped that list. And this wasn't part of the agreement to begin with; sex could happen without kissing or the emotion that came with it, but Gideon couldn't be sure that Harrow's reclusive ass would know anything about that. A sickening embarrassment brewed in the cavalier, hating that she knew what her necromancer's ashy, thin lips felt like. They were stained with the faint taste of iron where she bled when straining herself. Finally it ended, thank God, though Harrow lingered a little too close for Gideon's liking. “Just get on with it,” Gideon hissed.

"Oh, spare me such acidic looks. Don't think that all your staring is lost on me,” Harrow spat with a sinister knowledge. “Believe it or not, I pay much more attention to you than either of us would like to admit, on account of your unbelievably consistent tendency to wander and instigate trouble for the both of us."

"Oh I'm well aware. Kinda hard to miss you staring daggers through me twenty-four seven. Or maybe you just can't keep your eyes off me," Gideon smirked. Harrow was not entertained by either vocal or facial response; the accusations of feelings toward each other from both sides left them feeling quite vile, rather than purely insulted as was the intention.

“Let me put it another, painfully clear way so that you do not misinterpret: if my Lyctorhood was not currently at stake, I’d rather spend my day looking at you than at the hundreds of different doors in this barren place.”

"I'm right there with you," Gideon agreed, before fully understanding that what Harrow uttered so bitterly was not a complaint, but a compliment. Gideon had never earned praise from Harrow, no matter how correctly she obeyed her orders or easily she acquiesced to her. She’d not a clue as to why this occasion was any different. "Oh, you're serious," she almost laughed, and almost regretted the weariness of Harrow's sigh.

"When have I been anything but?" She sighed, her interest in delaying this endeavor waning rapidly. With a head tilt of genuine curiosity Gideon tugged the line between them taut, however, intent on reeling in a proper explanation for all this extra behavior. "Just shut up and listen." Harrow didn't wait for a response and continued curtly: "Between the hours I've spent traipsing miles up and down this labyrinth counting hundreds of doors and exerting myself to unconsciousness twice, all while you've been off flirting with the other adepts, I am a little frustrated, to say the least. And you are frustrated with me. That is the nature of our relationship, and I would like it to remain that way. I am choosing to risk my last shred of patience on you by offering to… relieve, our frustrations together, so I would actually be grateful if you would respect that for once. That is all."

Gideon had never heard Harrowhark spare so many consecutive words on her before. She felt like a wilting plant under the intense light of her laserlike scrutiny. And if that was how she felt, she could only imagine how hard Harrow bit her tongue while asking this of her. Gideon sucked down her pride as Harrow's mortal enemy, abhorring the bitter taste, and steeled herself before she pushed it back up.

"I just don’t want to hear all this flirty crap from you of all people before we go down out on each other out of our mutual loathing.”

“You would rather me be silent?” Harrow inquired, seemingly opposed. To her, silence between them must represent acceptance, which was the last thing either of them wanted to communicate. Hence her efforts to get under Gideon’s skin through teasing, to maintain their fragile status quo.

“I would rather you not accuse me of feeling anything more than nothing for you,” Gideon explained, perturbed completely by her implications otherwise.

“And I’ll thank you to do the same. Let's keep this exchange a purely business transaction," she asserted, as if to convince herself more than her cavalier, a moment that Gideon's mind clung to like a piece that simply did not fit into the puzzle.

"Just get this show on the road before I dry heave," Gideon grumbled, imagining how this must have pained Harrow, to place aside their mutual disdain in favor of pleasing each other. Then she thought of her beyond-death avulsion experience. “Actually, I've been through worse. You dragged me to the brink of death before and some type of compensation seems due if you ask me."

Harrow could not argue that, given her stony silence. Then she staggered up and off of Gideon and carefully removed her layers of shadowy robes, honoring her cavalier with a sight that no one, living or dead, had yet to see. Harrow's near-luminescent paleness stunned Gideon, who would have averted her eyes in jest were she not so surprised. Contrary to the single time she caught a horrifying glimpse of the pallid skin of her adept's neck, it was somehow less of a shock to see her full figure at once.

Harrow had sharp, regal shoulders that always seemed to point and pout toward whoever was currently bothering her. The already-visible taut outline of her ribs tightened whenever she breathed in. Two toothpicks of legs supported her bony hips. Hardly any real meat or muscle on her wiry frame. Maybe it was because Gideon had been raised around bare-ass skeletons her whole life, but she found Harrow pretty damn hot. What was a shock to Gideon was just how much robes could hide. Contrary to Harrow's obviously lacking posterior, her bust wasn't half bad.

"Nice tits," Gideon blurted without taking the time to consider a funnier or flirtier thing to say.

Harrow rolled her eyes and her head, brows furrowing in disgust.

"I thought we were sparing each other our commentary," she said as sepulchrally as ever.

"If you want to bone that badly…" Gideon sang, but Harrow only blinked, sinking to the bottom of her shallow patience. She opened her mouth to counter, but Gideon spoke first. "Also, are you really going to keep the face paint on?" Gideon asked calmly in a rare show of sincerity for her necromancer. Perhaps it hadn't occurred to Harrowhark to remove it; to Gideon it already felt like a second skin, a permanent force of habit. Harrow probably forgot she ever had it on, were it not for how often it ran and smeared under sweat and blood. Gideon didn't want that to arise as an issue now of all times.

Perhaps failing to recognize that possibility, Harrow said sternly, "That issue is divorced entirely from what is happening now. Make me a Lyctor and perhaps I'll grace you with the sight."

"I'll hold you to that. You've already shown me a hell of a lot so far. Speaking of," she growled, "I was just thinking that all the skeletons you've so graciously surrounded me with may not be the best way to set the mood," Gideon smiled fiercely.

Harrow had half a mind to plant her foot triumphantly on her loyal cavalier's face, but said loyal cavalier's patience waned by the moment and would gladly bite her toe off if given the chance. Besides, Gideon was not so low as to caress her willingly nor so devoutly as that. Yet. Harrow found no joy in forcing reactions from Griddle: organic frustration was her crop that she cultivated carefully.

"I can't trust you not to injure me during this process. You've already done so with your jokes."

“Sorry for having a sense of humor.” Gideon just sighed and looked distantly through the ceiling, wondering how she ever got into this position: bound still, even as Harrow's admittedly reluctant ally. And as she thought that, Gideon began to feel rather surely that this was less about Harrow wanting to have her under her control and more about not surrendering her control. Gideon weighed the worth of saying that out loud - whether it would incline Harrow to punish or pleasure her; probably some cruel mix of both. She decided to spin it and at least get a reaction from her. "Should I be on my knees begging for your forgiveness, or should I just bend over and accept whatever kinky punishment you've been having wet dreams about giving me?"

There again appeared that rare sight that Gideon felt quite proudly pleased of having earned: Harrow's black-painted lips curling into a smirk.

"Why don't you surprise me, for once in your life?" Harrow deflected Gideon's serve with her usual complacent grace, the incessant insistence of authority that Gideon loved to hate. That Harrow had not prefaced ‘your life’ with something synonymous with pathetic signalled to Gideon that, perhaps, her shriveled raisin of a heart had soured somewhat less toward her. "Time to put everything that your porno mags taught you to the test, Griddle."

"I'll knock your prayer beads right off, my crepuscular mistress."

"Right," she said dryly. "That's enough out of you. Let’s put that mouth of yours to work, shall we?"

\---

Somehow, licking between Harrow's lower lips was less repulsive than kissing her. Gideon readily explored why the fuck that could be, happy to busy her mind and remove it from what she currently focused on: getting her necromancer off as quickly as humanly possible.

"Surely you can do better, unless you're simply savoring the experience."

"Anything but," Gideon replied stonily before Harrow shuffled down and silenced her.

"Shut up," she sighed.

Gideon reluctantly improved her pace, now intending to actually knock Harrow's prayer beads off with a stellar performance. If she managed to blow her mind with the best (and likely only) orgasm of her life, Harrow would have little choice but to praise her.

The praise came sooner than she expected. Regretfully, the same could not be same for Harrowhark.

"It seems," she grunted, "that you can do more with that tongue than waste breath with stupid remarks."

Gideon exhaled heavily through her nose, her only method of response, and flicked her tongue. Harrow then moaned with a quantity of passion and heart that Gideon did not believe her to possess. Her cavalier wrung the rest of it out as Harrow bucked more wildly, losing her control to this tender pleasure she did not think Gideon capable of providing. Breathy, ghostlike moans slipped through her lips; Gideon placed her hands on Harrow's thin thighs to hold her steady as she gyrated and shook.

Harrow flinched at the touch but allowed it, and focused her riding directly on Gideon's mouth as she orgasmed violently: more than the corpse-like reaction that Gideon expected. Harrowhark clamped her legs tight around Gideon's face, who slurped and swallowed to prove her dedication to Harrow's command, who looked down and regarded her with the most bittersweet contradictory glare; reluctant to admit her cavalier's skill but sickened to feel her body's forceful reaction at her hands through haggard breaths and whispered curses. Finally her hips slowed, and she pushed off and away. Indeed, her face paint began to melt into an oily pool of tar.

“My word, Griddle…”

“I’m listening.” Gideon craned her head with a cocky grin, waiting to hear her praises sung.

“Your face looks good like that.”

“Fuck’s sakes… I don’t know what I expected.”

“If you truly want my praise that badly-”

“Nope.”

“-then allow me to return the favor already.”

“Just don’t smear your paint all over my legs,” Gideon said while sitting up and reclining into the pillows. "You look worse than ever, by the way."

“And what makes you think that my face will come anywhere near your legs?”

“Bitch… I just ate you out, so you had better do the same unless you want the hilt of my sword bashed into your skull.”

“Down, girl,” Harrow uttered lowly, fingers threatening to snap a skeleton into existence. “Make me smear my paint with summonings and it very well will run onto your legs.”

Gideon just grumbled to herself, wondering why Harrow got to have her flirty fun while the necro snaked up to her. It creeped Gideon out to see Harrow serving someone, much less herself, but she closed her eyes and just tried to enjoy it. She told herself, as Harrowhark’s tongue slid between her slit, that Harrow wouldn’t have suggested this if she didn’t desire to please her cavalier herself. She had to harbor some level of lust within her, it was just human nature. But then again, Harrowhark Nonagesimus was the person furthest from standard human that Gideon had encountered thus far. Even someone like Ianthe of the Third House could emulate human emotion more believably than Harrow.

But, even Gideon had to admit that Harrow could emulate sexual skill finely. Her tongue swam swiftly and deftly through Gideon’s slickening folds, likely just as eager to get this over with, but Gideon pretended rather blissfully that her necromancer wanted to please her for all the trouble she’d put her through. Gideon rocked her hips smoothly - Harrow's paint slathered all over her thighs as expected - but that was kind of hot in itself. She enjoyed the fact that Harrow was ruining her makeup just for her. That Harrow was down on her knees for her. That Harrow was helping her out and serving her interests for a change. No wonder she commanded Gideon so harshly; this was kind of nice.

She recognized that this was short-lived, however, and enjoyed it while it lasted as she approached the end of the pleasure that Harrow was willing to offer.

"That silver tongue of yours is good for more than snide remarks, I see."

Harrow only scowled. She upped her pace, earning a deep moan from Gideon, who sat up and reached forward to press Harrow's head down between her legs before she tried copping out early. Gideon took out her frustrations on Harrow's face, riding her hard and close as she came spectacularly for the first time in what felt like ages, and finally by hands other than her own. Though, that it was Harrow's doing, Gideon was unsure whether she considered that the ultimate victory or loss in her life.

"And now we're even," she sighed, releasing her hold on Harrow’s blacker-than-night hair. "Whew. Intense stuff right there Harrowhark."

Harrow promptly sat up, wiped her mouth on her arm and replaced her robes with a fluttery flourish that very clearly communicated her humiliation.

"Never again shall you see me nude or submitting to your erotic fantasies."

"Hey, don't forget that this was your idea." Gideon crossed her arms behind her head and added, "And if I may say, a pretty good one, because as much as I loathe you I would be happy to receive that kind of treatment again. Don't know about you."

Harrow’s grip tightened to the whites of her knuckles on the hem of her robe. That Gideon was capable of admitting that out loud got under her skin, for she was not willing to speak it, not even to herself. Her eyes bugged at Gideon and she froze mid-turn, trying desperately to grasp whether she intended that as a joke or not. Then she snarled and escaped the room without giving an answer.

\---

Later that night, Gideon returned to their room, sans necromancer. She discovered a note on her bed written by Harrowhark's hasty and sharp scrawling:

**I will permit that activity again, should our needs arise.**

"Just call it sex, bones for brains…"

**Author's Note:**

> I really love these two and their relationship and just couldn’t wait to write them. So here’s some bickering. I wasn’t intending to follow through and write the smut scene in because I really just wanted to write them talking and teasing each other, but I figured such a cliffhanger ending would probably leave a bad taste. I also made a slight effort to switch up my writing style a bit, so despite all of that and it being a little rushed due to my feeling sick to my stomach while writing this, I hope you enjoyed! I’m just too eager to get it out to work on it any longer lol.


End file.
